Transcribing Voices, Fashioning a Genre: Orality, Hybridity, and Inventiveness in James Oswald’s Songs from Ossian

Abstract

Abstract:A volume of songs with tunes, The Pocket Companion for the Guittar (n.d.), issued in London by the Scottish composer and music publisher James Oswald, contains nine songs from the poems of Ossian that were purportedly taken down from the singing of James Macpherson, their originator. This essay examines the origin and background of these songs from a cultural and political perspective, posing the questions as to when and why they were conceived, allegedly transcribed from the singing of the author, and inserted into a volume of mainly instrumental tunes, and their texts, by recognized masters such as Handel and Pergolesi. The date of inclusion must have been after the appearance of Temora (1763), the third and final volume of Macpherson’s Ossian poems, since several of the song texts are taken from that work. But the instrumental volume itself, the sixth in a series issued by Oswald, may already have been in preparation and Oswald probably wanted to take advantage of Macpherson’s latest bestseller. The central argument of this article is that these songs are a unique hybrid, reflective of the status of their makers in a London often suspicious of inventive “North Britons” like Macpherson and Oswald.